7 Movies That Stole Their Plot From Comic Books

Some of the comic book plot-stealing featured here could easily be dismissed as coincidence, homage or simply two separate artworks drawing on the same familiar genre tropes as opposed to outright plagiarism. With Shia LaBeouf’s short film Howard Cantour.com, however, there’s no doubting he committed what’s possibly the most unabashed act of comic book plagiarism ever seen.

Focusing on a bitter online film critic, the short premiered at Cannes Film Festival in 2012 to favourable reviews and according to LaBeouf was inspired by his own experience of being on the receiving end of a fair share of film critic vitriol during his acting career.

Then fans of indie graphic novelist Daniel Clowes began noticing the similarities between LaBeouf’s short and Clowes 2007 short comic Justin M. Damiano published in the anthology The Book of Other People. Actually, ‘similarities’ is putting it mildly: this was more like brazen cribbing.

Not only had LaBeouf borrowed Clowes’ film critic protagonist, he’d also stolen the comic’s opening monologue word-for-word and poached other sections of dialogue practically verbatim too.

Adding insult to injury, LaBeouf then issued a series of pitiful ‘apologies’ via Twitter that also turned out to be plagiarised themselves from sources as strange as old Yahoo! Answers entries and a random Texan politician.

Naturally, LaBeouf later tried to play the whole thing off as part of his pretentious performance art dabblings rather than an act of plagiarism. Whether that’s true or not, it was still a major d**k move either way.